Part 16 (1/2)
”Who's calling?” she murmured, and ran to the door, card in hand.
”I didn't hear any one,” Ruth called after her.
But Roberta disappeared. Around the turn of the hall she scanned her card.
”_Thorns to the th.o.r.n.y_,” she read, and stood staring at the unexpected words written in a firm, masculine hand. That was all. Did it sting?
Yet, curiously enough, Roberta rather liked that odd message.
When she came back, Ruth, in the excitement of examining many other Christmas offerings, had rushed on, leaving the box of roses on Roberta's bed. The recipient took out a single rose and examined its stem. Thorns! She had never seen sharper ones--and not one had been removed. But the rose itself was perfection.
CHAPTER X
OPINIONS AND THEORIES
Mr. and Mrs. Rufus Gray were the last to leave the city, after the house-party. They returned to their brother Robert's home for a day, when the other guests had gone, and it was on the evening before their departure that they related their experiences while at the house of Matthew Kendrick. With most of the members of the Gray household, they were sitting before the fire in the living-room when Aunt Ruth suddenly spoke her mind.
”I don't know when I've felt so sorry for the too rich as I felt in that house,” said she. She was knitting a gray silk mitten, and her needles were flying.
”Why, Aunt Ruth?” inquired her nephew Louis, who sat next her, revelling in the comfort of home after a particularly hara.s.sing day at the office.
”Did they seem to lack anything in particular?”
”I should say they did,” she replied. ”Nothing that money can buy, of course, but about everything that it can't.”
”For instance?” he pursued, turning affectionate eyes upon his aunt's small figure in its gray gown, as the firelight played upon it, touching her abundant silvering locks and making her eyes seem to sparkle almost as brilliantly as her swiftly moving needles.
Aunt Ruth put down her knitting for an instant, looking at her nephew.
”Why, you know,” said she. ”You're sitting in the very middle of it this minute!”
Louis looked about him, smiling. He was, indeed, in the midst of an accustomed scene of both home-likeness and beauty. The living-room was of such generous proportions that even when the entire family were gathered there they could not crowd it. On a wide couch, at one side of the fireplace, sat his father and mother, talking in low tones concerning some matter of evident interest, to judge by their intent faces. Rosamond, like the girl she resembled, sat, girl fas.h.i.+on, on a pile of cus.h.i.+ons close by the fire; and Stephen, her husband, not far away, by a table with a drop-light, was absorbed in a book. Uncle Rufus was examining a pile of photographs on the other side of the table. Ted sprawled on a couch at the far end of the room, deep in a boy's magazine, a reading light at his elbow. At the opposite end of the room, where the piano stood, Roberta, music rack before her, was drawing her bow across nearly noiseless strings, while Ruth picked softly at her harp: indications of intention to burst forth into musical strains when a hush should chance to fall upon the company.
Judge Calvin Gray alone was absent from the gathering, and even as Louis's eyes wandered about the pleasant room, his uncle's figure appeared in the doorway. As if he were answering his sister Ruth, Judge Gray spoke his thought.
”I wonder,” said he, advancing toward the fireside, ”if anywhere in this wide world there is a happier family life than this!”
Louis sprang up to offer Judge Gray the chair he had been occupying--a favourite, luxuriously cus.h.i.+oned armchair, with a reading light beside it ready to be switched on at will, which was Uncle Calvin's special treasure, of an evening. Louis himself took up his position on the hearth-rug, opposite Rosamond.
Aunt Ruth answered her brother energetically: ”None happier, Calvin, I'll warrant, and few half as happy. I can't help wis.h.i.+ng those two people Rufus and I've been visiting could look in here just now.”
”Why make them envious?” suggested Louis, who loved to hear his Aunt Ruth's crisp speeches.
”The question is--would they be envious?” This came from Stephen, whose absorption in his book evidently admitted of penetration from the outside.
”Why, of course they would!” declared Aunt Ruth. ”You should have seen the way they had me pour the coffee and tea, all the while I was there.
That young man Richard was always getting me to pour something--said he liked to see me do it. And he was always sending a servant off and doing things for me himself. If I'd been a young girl he couldn't have hovered round any more devotedly.”
A general laugh greeted this, for Aunt Ruth's expression of face as she told it was provocative.
”We can readily believe that, Ruth,” declared Judge Gray, and his brother Robert nodded. The low-voiced talk between Mr. Robert Gray and his wife had ceased; Stephen had laid down his book; Ruth had stopped plucking at her harp strings; and only Roberta still seemed interested in anything but Aunt Ruth and her experiences and opinions.